The Story Behind Donald Trump's Epic Mar-A-Lago Portrait

At Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, a portrait of the club's owner, Donald Trump, hangs in the bar. Artist Ralph Wolfe Cowan painted "The Visionary," as it's called, in 1989.

"Nobody ever dislikes my portraits," Cowan says. "I know how to make them 'healthy' is the way I put it." The 84-year-old artist is in the spotlight now thanks to the portrait of Trump in tennis whites, but Cowan will likely go down in history as the last of a breed—the painter of kings.

When I reached him over the phone at his Palm Beach studio, he pointed out that he'd painted more reigning monarchs than any other portrait painter in history. "But that's not because I'm that good," he said, laughing. "It's because the Old Masters could not go from England to France—it would take a lifetime. I could fly there in an afternoon!"

The portrait adorns one wall in the bar at Mar-a-Lago.

Alamy

The Virginia native has painted such royals as Queen Elizabeth II of England, King Hassan of Morocco, The Sultan of Brunei, and Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, nearly all in person. But Cowan decided to paint Trump on a whim. Cowan had been to Mar-a-Lago in his twenties, after he'd run into Joseph Davies, the third husband of Marjorie Merriweather Post, in Portsmouth Virginia and snagged an invitation to one of Merriweather-Post's famous dinner parties. When Trump bought the place in the late '80s, Cowan wanted to paint the new owner of a place that still retained all its midcentury glamour and mystique.

"I saw him there working, getting the pools changed and such," Cowan said. "But I didn't want to paint him in his blue suit. Those were his New York clothes. I wanted to give him a Florida look. So I did an oil sketch, and he loved it." Cowan pointed out one basis for their friendly relationship: both he and Trump had a long association with beauty pageants. "I judged a lot of beauty pageants and he did too," he says. "A portrait painter who paints beautiful women is the perfect judge!"

Trump saw the painting and liked it. But after he hung it at Mar-A-Lago, something bothered him. Since Cowan had made it as an oil sketch, some parts were unfinished, notably Trump's left hand, which rested imperially but incompletely on his thigh. "How much would you charge me to put my other hand in?" Trump wanted to know. Cowan came up with the figure of $4,000. "I'll get back with you," the author of The Art of the Deal said. (Although it hardly seems like an indication of his future support of the arts, Trump did eventually agree to the price.)

He doesn't have little hands, like people have said. They're perfectly proportioned.

"He doesn't have little hands, like people have said," Cowan told me. "They're perfectly proportioned. I like Donald. I even voted for him, but I have to stay out of politics. When I'm in a room full of kings, I have to watch what I say!"

Cowan with his portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. Clearly he likes this sweater.

Ralph Wolfe Cowan

But it's hard to avoid politics when you chat with the ruling class. Over dinner with the King of Iraq (Cowan didn't specify which one or when the dinner took place, but as a point of reference, the last king was deposed in 1958), a sensitive question about farming came up, and the King asked Cowan what American farmers would think. Cowan demurred. "I live in Palm Beach," he told the monarch. "All we grow there is jewelry and clothes."

For all his reticence on political issues, Cowan does get involved in the lives of his subjects. When he was painting Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nayhan, one of the principal founders of the United Arab Emirates, the two went out planting trees together, one of the Sheikh's favorite hobbies. "He had hands like steel!" Cowan remembers.

Politics have changed, too, since Cowan got his start. The Marcoses were very kind to him, he says, and he painted the portrait of Gorbachev as a favor to Imelda, without ever meeting the final President of the Soviet Union.

Cowan didn't necessarily need to see much of the people he painted. That was a skill he developed early, when his artistic ambitions were met with reluctance by family and friends, who did not want to sit for portraits. So he adapted: he ran into a room to spy on people then ran back to his paintings to capture the likeness. It proved very good training for painting impatient monarchs.

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